Cate Blanchett at the Rome film festival: ‘I will fight to the death to play roles beyond my experience.’
Photograph: Franco Origlia/Getty Images

Cate Blanchett is so good at playing lesbians that even when her character is not explicitly written as a lesbian, it is possible to suspend enough disbelief to decide that, well, maybe, Lou in Ocean’s 8, just may be.

At the Rome film festival, she spoke about the growing noise around the idea that straight actors should not play gay characters on screen. Around this year’s Oscars, theAdvocate reported that 52 straight actors have been nominated for Academy Awards for gay roles. Actors have often spoken of the stigma around being “openly” gay when it comes to getting parts. This discussion became something of a roar in August, with the “backlash against” (or “row around”, depending on where you saw it) Jack Whitehall voicing Disney’s first major gay character – although I once lost a month to reading essays on whether Elsa’s “special powers” in Frozen had a deeper subtext.

Blanchett defended the idea that an actor need not necessarily be like the characters they play.

“It also speaks to something that I’m quite passionate about in storytelling generally, but in film specifically, that film can be quite a literal medium. And I will fight to the death for the right to suspend disbelief and play roles beyond my experience,” she said. Having played Bob Dylan, an elf and an animated vigilante Viking who lives among dragons, her point seems valid. “We expect and only expect people to make a profound connection to a character when it’s close to their experience,” she added, suggesting that reality television might be partly responsible for a shift in our expectations of how storytelling should work. It amounts to a strange erosion of empathy.

Not for the first time, I felt grateful for Blanchett, who gives off an air of someone who could hold a sensible discussion with a seahorse. She has had some opposition, but it’s disappointing and lacks nuance. Debates around this topic are complicated and complexity is rarely popular in a polarised age.

Scarlett Johansson taking the role of a trans character when trans actors have been so vocal about finding it difficult to get work, even in trans roles, was thoughtless at best and it seemed right that she stepped down. It also seemed right that Blanchett should play the title role in Carol, say, a film directed, produced and written by queer people who chose to cast Blanchett in the story they were telling. Actors are part of the storytelling machine, of course, but it’s misguided to see them as the entirety of it.

Mary Beard offers a history lesson for re-enacters

Mary Beard, not to be confused with Mary Berry, who did not write Women and Power – and thank you to the man from the bookshop who pointed this out when I asked him where a copy of it was – has planted her flag in the “firmly against” camp when it comes to the inhuman practice of historical re-enactments in documentaries.

She said there will be “no drama reconstructions in any programme made by me; no B-list actors dressed up in sheets, saying, ‘Do pass the grapes, Marcus’.”

Reconstructions often ruin documentaries in my view, so I am with Beard, though my bugbear is more specific. While I can see the practical need to get actors to dress up as Tudors, for example – the 4G coverage in the 16th century was so poor that nobody could save their Snapchats – there is no excuse for Marcus to pretend to be passing the grapes in instances where there is plenty of footage of actual Marcus passing the actual grapes. Naturally, this being 2018, she has since apologised for the fuss. “Sincere apologies to all actors, struggling and otherwise (perhaps I shd say I was trying to rescue you from having to dress up in sheets and learn some dumb dialogue!),” she tweeted.

More power to Caitlyn Jenner for her mea culpa

In a column for the Washington Post, Caitlyn Jenner has formally taken back her support for Donald Trump, in response to the slow drip of legislative venom aimed at transgender people. “I believed I could work within the party and the Trump administration to shift the minds of those who most needed shifting,” wrote Jenner. “Sadly, I was wrong.”

“You made a promise to protect the LGBTQ community. Call me,” she said in an Instagram post directed at Trump, in 2017, after the administration rolled back legal protections of transgender school students. “You don’t give us equality and a fair shot; I’m coming after you,” she told ABC News later that year.

This “I’m not mad, I’m disappointed” rhetoric, as if the president of the United States had been caught bunking maths to smoke in the bus shelter, disappeared into the ether with all the impact of an odourless vape. The New York Timesreported last week that the administration is considering “narrowly defining gender as a biological, immutable condition determined by genitalia at birth”. It is outrageous, dehumanising and cruel and appears to have nudged Jenner into action.

That she has only now fully acknowledged that it was a mistake to trust Trump doesn’t do much to quieten the criticism that her privilege cushioned her from harm enough to even consider voting for him in the first place, and it is endlessly infuriating that people can only see the extent of a problem when it has a direct impact on them. And yet, even in its “sadly”, it is honest. I can’t help but wonder if a formerly vocal Trump supporter explaining why she now believes that choice to have been wrong will have far more impact than a Democrat-supporting Barbra Streisand telling her Democrat-supporting fans to vote Democrat.